If you can tell me of a more understated topic on the CCIE Routing and Switching v4.0 lab blueprint than Optimized Edge Routing (OER), I’ll buy you a beer. This was quietly snuck into the blueprint in between policy-based routing and redistribution, both fairly straightforward topics. Should be no big deal right? False.

OER removes rigidness of standard IP routing where typical routing metrics are derived from physical layer measurements and in turn, dictates a generic routing policy for all traffic. OER does this by gathering higher-lever performance metrics through IP SLA and Netflow information and uses this to determine the most optimal exit point for certain destination prefixes or traffic classes. Once the ideal exit point has been decided, routing policy is dynamically updated to influence the specific traffic class.

Navigating through the configuration guide for OER can be daunting but configuration can be broken down into 5 steps:

1. Profile

The selection of a subset of traffic to optimize performance

Learns the flows passing through the router with the highest delay or throughput

Statically configure class of traffic to performance route

2. Measure

Once traffic has been profiled, metrics need to be generated against it. This is down through:

Passive monitoring – measuring performance of a traffic flow as the flow is traversing the data path